Elvis and Priscilla
Rock ‘n roll’s legendary love story wasn’t what it seemed
Written by Kylie Hynes, Contributing Writer
Illustrated by Shea Murphy, Contributing Graphic Staff
He was a global superstar. She was a young teen. He grew up in the country. She was born in the city. He had the world at his feet. Her world revolved around him. Their love story is legendary, their image is iconic and yet the relationship between the “King of Rock ‘n Roll” and his queen has proven to be far more than meets the eye.
The enigmatic, tumultuous relationship of music legend Elvis Presley and his wife Priscilla began and ended in an almost 15 year-long whirlwind of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. Though undoubtedly filled with deep love and friendship, Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship also had more than its fair share of toxicity. With Elvis frequently walking the line between passion for and possession of Priscilla, many have been left wondering whether their relationship was true love, infatuation or mere friendship. Though once in “Burning Love,” controlling tendencies, infidelity, distance and living in the fast lane eventually had Elvis and Priscilla Presley checking into the “Heartbreak Hotel.”
It was a Nov. night in 1959 when Elvis Presley set eyes on Priscilla Beaulieu for the first time (Borelli-Persson, 2016). While enlisted in the U.S. Army, the 24-year-old singer was serving in West Germany when he met the 14-year-old daughter of a U.S. Air Force Major at a party he was hosting at his temporary home in Bad Nauheim. Having been invited to Elvis’s party to meet him earlier that day by one of his friends who saw her at a restaurant, Priscilla arrived in a navy blue and white sailor dress and quickly drew the gaze of an all-too-familiar pair of icy blue eyes.
Undeterred by their ten-year age gap or her admittance to being a ninth-grader, Elvis charmed Priscilla in the same effortless manner with which he’d charmed his millions of female fans: with his voice. Very much aware that she was experiencing nearly every girl in the world’s wildest fantasy, Priscilla savored every moment Elvis Presley spent making an effort to impress her by singing several of his most romantic songs (Kettler, 2021).
In the same way that Cinderella returned to her ordinary life after the ball as if spending a blissful night with the prince was nothing more than a dream, Priscilla returned to life as usual after Elvis’s party not expecting to hear from him again. But we know how this story goes—just as the prince searched the kingdom until he found his bride, Elvis pursued Priscilla, asked her on a date and kissed her for the first time (Kettler, 2020).
Though Priscilla’s age kept them from going out in public, one date led to another until Elvis and Priscilla were inseparable and after four dates, he met her parents (Kyriazis, 2021). Although they were initially skeptical given his age and celebrity status, Elvis’s natural charm and casual bravado eventually convinced them to allow Priscilla to continue seeing him. However, upon his honorable discharge a few months later in March 1960, Elvis left Priscilla behind in Germany to return to his life of music and movies in the U.S.
As Priscilla’s parents predicted, her relationship with Elvis ended in Germany—or so they thought. Despite having countless starlets on his arm throughout his film career in the 1960s, Elvis maintained his relationship with Priscilla in secret. Their clandestine correspondence was insisted upon by Elvis’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, to keep Elvis within the terms of the morality clause in his contract and to maintain his appeal as a single teen heartthrob (Kyriazis, 2021).
After two years of being an ocean apart, Elvis convinced Priscilla’s parents to let her move to Los Angeles with him but shortly after she arrived, he added Las Vegas to his itinerary. It was during her time with Elvis in Sin City that Priscilla began taking amphetamines and sleeping pills to keep up with his nocturnal schedule. Adopting not only Elvis’s lifestyle but also his image, Priscilla started to become what she would later describe as “Elvis’s Living Doll to be fashioned as he pleased” (Kettler, 2021).
No longer looking like the innocent girl Elvis met across the sea two years before, Priscilla became the character she deemed worthy of standing behind the world’s biggest star. Her hair was dyed and styled to match his signature jet black pompadour, heavy makeup was applied to his liking, porcelain caps were placed on her teeth, her posture improved and her wardrobe was made to coordinate with his (Drysdale, 2016). Despite these specifications, Priscilla later revealed that Elvis never saw her without makeup and never saw her getting dressed because he always wanted “to see the end result.”
In addition to molding her image, Elvis also served as Priscilla’s mentor, “someone who studied [her] every gesture, listened critically to [her] every utterance and was generous, to a fault, with advice” (Presley, 1985). Priscilla later recalled that there were evenings when he’d send her upstairs to change clothes because her outfit was “dull,” “unflattering” or “not dressy enough” for him. He even scrutinized the way she walked, telling her to move more slowly and had her walking around the house with a book on her head for a time.
The glitz and glamor of Hollywood and Priscilla’s new image soon faded when Elvis asked her to live with him in his Graceland estate in Memphis, Tenn. Still only 16 years old, Priscilla’s parents were highly concerned about the kind of lifestyle she’d been living with Elvis. They were hesitant to allow her to follow him yet again, but on the condition that Priscilla would finish high school, they allowed her to live in Memphis (Presley, 1985).
Keeping up with both Elvis and her schoolwork proved to be exceedingly difficult for Priscilla, so at Elvis’s suggestion, she began taking a combination of diet and sleeping pills (Kettler, 2020). Nearly everything she did became about being more available and pleasing to the man who often left her behind at the drop of a dime. In her 1985 tell-all of her relationship with Elvis, Priscilla admitted that “Anything I could think of doing for Elvis, I did. I made sure Graceland was always warm and inviting, with the lights turned low, as he preferred them, the temperature in his bedroom set to his exact desire (freezing) and the kitchen filled with the aroma of his favorite meals… I loved babying Elvis” (Presley, 1985).
Though Elvis loved that Priscilla was “young enough that [he] [could] train her any way [he] want[ed],” perhaps the thing he valued most about his young beau was her purity. While Priscilla desired nothing more than to take her physical relationship with him all the way, he was the one to pump the breaks in the bedroom (Kettler, 2020).
Although Elvis fully delayed consummating his relationship with Priscilla until their wedding night, he made sure she learned that there was far more to pleasure and intimacy than just intercourse. When they weren’t watching the newest films in theaters, Elvis could be found introducing Priscilla to a world of role play and sexual fantasies and making good use of their polaroid camera while doing so (Presley, 1985).
Dubbed Elvis’s “Live-in Lolita” by the press, Priscilla stayed at Graceland while Elvis traveled the world making music and movies. Torn between his desire to play the field and to settle down with a woman that would make his late mother proud, Elvis kept Priscilla on a pedestal of virginal naïveté while he dated girl after girl. However, the bachelor lifestyle he was living while everyone knew he had a girlfriend back home eventually began to affect his career. Living in 'unmarried sin' with Priscilla for so many years while having multiple other girlfriends began to frustrate nearly everyone in Elvis’s life, especially his manager and Priscilla’s father (Presley, 1985).
Under immense pressure to settle down and marry Priscilla, Elvis popped the question in Dec. 1966 and five months later they were married at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. Though his housekeeper saw him in tears the night before at being forced into marriage on someone else’s terms, Elvis went through with the wedding. On May 1, 1967, in an event that more closely resembled a publicity stunt than a romantic celebration of marriage, Elvis and Priscilla were married in an eight-minute-long ceremony that was witnessed by just a few family members and friends (Kyriazis, 2021).
Shrouded in secrecy and followed by a press conference and champagne breakfast, Elvis and Priscilla’s special day seemed anything but romantic, but the singer was determined to make their wedding day special. Upon their arrival in Palm Springs–where they would spend their wedding night and honeymoon–Elvis carried Priscilla across the threshold of their house singing the Hawaiian Wedding Song and stopped to give her a long, loving kiss before he proceeded to carry her upstairs to their bedroom. It was that night that they fully consummated their relationship at last in an encounter Priscilla would later describe as “a frenzy of passion” (Presley, 1985).
Unfortunately, newlywed bliss failed to follow the loved-up couple post-honeymoon. When Priscilla found out she was having a baby, she feared pregnancy would disrupt the way Elvis saw her—and she was right. Seven months into her pregnancy, Elvis asked for a trial separation and briefly left her for fear of how his new image as a husband–and soon, as a father–would affect his career. After a few months of Elvis seemingly coming to his senses, Priscilla gave birth to their only daughter, Lisa Marie, on Feb. 1, 1968 (exactly nine months after their wedding day) with Elvis at her side (Cagle, 1992).
Recalling a time before their marriage when Elvis told her that he had “never been able to make love to a woman who’d had a child,” Priscilla discovered that Elvis was reluctant to sleep with her after childbirth (Presley, 1985). Fed up with his infidelity and sick of waiting for him to come home to her and Lisa Marie, Priscilla had two affairs of her own; one with the owner of her dance studio and the other with her karate instructor (Kettler, 2020).
As tours and long engagements took Elvis even further from his family, Priscilla realized that she and Elvis might never be together in the way she dreamed. The more he kept them apart, the more she suspected that he would never be the man she wanted him to be for their family (Presley, 1985).
Over the years, the pressures piling up on their marriage proved too much to bear. Death threats, paternity lawsuits, assault-and-battery charges and jealous husbands claiming they’d seen Elvis flirting with their wives drove Priscilla to the edge (Presley, 1985). To cope with the chaos that was his life, Elvis increased his dependence on drugs and pills and started losing perspective on himself and others. To Priscilla, he became increasingly unreachable (Presley, 1985).
In 1972, Priscilla informed her husband of six years (and partner of 14 years) that she was leaving him. On Oct. 9, 1973, Elvis softly sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” to his ex-wife as the pair exited the courtroom and walked down the steps of the Santa Monica courthouse hand in hand with hostility nor bitterness between them any longer (Dorwart, 2021). They remained close friends and confidants until his untimely death four years later in 1977.
While some would blame their divorce on the destruction caused by the infamous sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship was never sustainable. Having met the larger-than-life star and being swept into his unsustainable lifestyle at just 14 years old, Priscilla never got the chance to discover who she was outside of who she was with him, and that was why she had to leave him.“My life was his life," she told People Magazine in 1978, "My problems were secondary" (Kettler, 2020).
Priscilla would later admit, "I did not divorce him because I didn't love him. He was the love of my life, but I had to find out about the world" (Kettler, 2020). Feeling as though Elvis belonged to the whole world while she belonged only to him fueled Priscilla’s slow-burning identity crisis and sense of discontentment. With her lack of self on top of his substance abuse, infidelity and absence, it’s a wonder their relationship lasted as long as it did.
Sources:
Borrelli-Persson, L. ( 2016, May 1). Happy Anniversary, Elvis and Priscilla! Everything You Need to Know about Their Ultimate Las Vegas Wedding. Vogue.
Cagle, J. (1992, May 1). Elvis Presley Marries Priscilla. Entertainment Weekly.
Dorwart, L. (2021, March 26). Priscilla Presley Realized a Dark Truth When She Held Elvis Presley's Hand in Divorce Court. Showbiz Cheat Sheet.
Drysdale, J. (2016, November 16). Priscilla Presley Opens up about Spending Teenage Years with Elvis, Says He Never Saw Her without Makeup. Entertainment Tonight.
Kettler, S. (2021, November 5). Elvis Felt Pressured to Marry Priscilla and 'Trained' Her to Become His Perfect Wife. Biography.com. A&E Networks Television.
Kyriazis, S. (2021, September 6). Elvis 'Did Not Want to Marry Priscilla' and Sobbed 'I Don't Have a Choice: But Why?” Express UK.
Presley, Priscilla. (1985, September 16). “Restricted: He Saved Me for so Long.” People Magazine.